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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

I get why people take issue with GIMP, but I'm glad that it exists and has existed. Back in the day I got a lot done with GIMP for both fun and school work, and it was great that it worked both on Windows and Linux. Better tools are around now, and GIMP has failed to live up to a lot of its promises, but I don't get why people need to shit all over it. No one is making you use GIMP. It's honestly amazing that people can even come close to making this kind of software as FOSS and keep it going for this long.

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What frustrates me is that it somehow sucks all the oxygen away from e.g. Krita, which is better in all the ways that matter. And frankly most of the whole Gtk/Gnome umbrella is like that. I don't know if it's just americans not wanting to touch a European project or what, but it's just infuriating.

I've never looked at Krita because it's always been referenced to me as a painting application primarily and not an image editing / photo manipulation tool. I understand there may be some cross over in functionality, but aren't they essentially built for different purposes?

I don't know; a lot of people say something like that but they never seem to give a concrete example of what the different things they need are. Krita has always been able to do all the photo editing I ever wanted to.

I think people just feel that the software is not for them. Krita always markets itself as a painting tool for artists, never mentioning image editing. For example, take the first paragraph that you can come across their website:

"Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.

- concept art

- texture and matte painters

- illustrations and comics"

I'm not in the business of either, so why would I get the idea of installing it?

Looking into it, Krita does seem very capable. I don't think we should really be mad at healthy competition existing in these spaces though, they should lead to better tools for end users.

We should drop this "healthy competition" myth.

Some of this software has been around as long as I've been alive.

I love Open Source but we should just accept that some of it will always be mediocre at best. And as the other commenter mentioned, there are also negative consequences to something being around (mind share, presence in distributions and online docs, etc).

Nobody has time to wait 4 decades for software to be good.

This makes successful Open Source software like Blender or Firefox or Linux all the more impressive.

This is one of the big problems with so much open-source/Free software: there's a lot of fragmentation, and competition between projects reduces mindshare and developer resources (which were already scarce). So as a result, these projects never become all that popular.

There's a few counter-examples of truly exemplary FOSS software that achieved a dominant position and managed to avoid too much fragmentation so that they became largely adopted: the Linux kernel, PostgreSQL, X.org, etc. But for many others, too many wars have really caused the whole Linux-on-the-desktop dream to not be achieved to the level people hoped. GIMP is one of them, but the Gnome/KDE debacle is probably the biggest.

It's somewhat ironic that you've included X.org in that list given (a) its history, and (b) how much time and effort has been spent in recent years on creating something to replace it.

You're right that fragmentation can be an issue - but it's often a people problem, not a technical problem: if I have strong feelings on how a particular piece of software should work, and it's made clear that the project leads disagree and any patch to implement such will be rejected, I'm not likely to invest hobby / recreational development time in any other aspect of that project. (That's not meant as a criticism of the hypothetical project leads - merely an observation that when people work on project for the enjoyment of it, rather than for a living, the bar is raised massively in terms of how much a developer needs to "believe" in the project and the direction it's taking.)

>It's somewhat ironic that you've included X.org in that list given (a) its history, and (b) how much time and effort has been spent in recent years on creating something to replace it.

There's nothing "ironic" about it at all. For many, many years, X.org was the only real display server that anyone used, after they all abandoned XFree86 for good reason. Wayland didn't come about until later, and even then, *it was made by the same people*. It was never a competing project.

>if I have strong feelings on how a particular piece of software should work, and it's made clear that the project leads disagree and any patch to implement such will be rejected

This is understandable, but frequently not the case. The KDE/Gnome fiasco, for instance, all started because of an argument about a license.

>merely an observation that when people work on project for the enjoyment of it, rather than for a living

Here again, it's frequently not the case. In the KDE/Gnome fiasco, many of the devs there were employed full-time by companies like RedHat to work on it. So it was really political.

You say that as if people would be working on the same project otherwise. Guaranteed if they aren't able to work on their competing project in the name of "solidarity", they probably wouldn't work on the other project instead. There are too many social and cultural barriers to being able to enact change in existing projects, which is why competing projects exist. People have different priorities, values, preferences, etc. You're never going to be able to unify all of that to the satisfaction of everybody involved and it would just lead to way too much strife and politics. Way less would get done.

I hate Gnome, but I know people like it. I'm happy that both KDE and Gnome exist, because it also means the people who made the decisions about Gnome's direction won't be making those same decisions about KDE.

There were no social or cultural barriers when the KDE/Gnome war started. It was entirely over a licensing issue. Other than that, the two projects were largely very similar, except that Gnome insisted on using C instead of C++ (and then replicating all of C++'s features in C). It wasn't until later that the two really diverged, with KDE having the "make it as configurable as possible" philosophy and Gnome having the "we're UI experts and know what's best for you little users" philosophy, borrowed from Apple but without the well-funded team of real UI researchers.

Anyway, even with the different philosophy towards users, that could have been done in a single project (i.e., Gnome3 can be a KDE skin), or two closely-related projects (i.e., Gnome3 is a fork of Plasma but otherwise shares the same libraries), reducing a lot of duplicated effort. Instead, we now have 6 or more different desktop environments for Linux and potential new users look at the mess and ask, "WTF?". Or they try one and hate it, and when they ask how to switch to a different one to try it out, the answer is "reformat your hard drive and install this other distro that actually cares about that DE", or "follow this list of command-line instructions and hope it doesn't break because your distro doesn't care about supporting that DE".

Blender started getting good only a few years ago, before that it was a big UI mess.

If I'm reading their release history right, the big UI rewrite was in 2.57, back in 2011.

That's not "a few years ago". It's "a baby is born, starts walking and talking, goes to kindergarten, primary school and is in secondary school now".

I think it was version 2.8 where it started to become a real alternative to paid programs.

> some of it will always be mediocre at best

Noone claims that all open source is great.

I wanted to be nice. Gimp is mediocre at best.

Which is a shame for the huge volume of work put into it. Across 27 (!) years.

Only if better tools are actually getting into users' hands though. I don't know what exactly has gone wrong, but somehow it's the Gimp that keeps getting recommended to those end users.

Yeah, I think this is a good point. GIMP has been a default app on so many distros for so many years (to say nothing of existing on virtually every copy pasta “best FOSS/Linux/Free apps list” that lazy SEO bloggers (and now YouTubers) have been making for decades), it’s become just one of those defacto apps that gets all the attention/is the go-to suggestion, even though it isn’t the best option for a lot of people.

And that would be fine if there was a robust community around the project, but there isn’t? Like, I’m not blaming the few maintainers and I’m not blaming the dwindling third party community at all. But I am going to be critical of the distros that continue to install it by default (Ubuntu dropped it as a default many years back IIRC, but Debian and Fedora still include it) and the people that just parrot it as what new users should use, even tho the most fervent defenders admit it is not at all competitive with what you need in an image editing tool in 2022.

Edit: turns out Ubuntu dropped GIMP as a default app in 2009 and someone that seems like yesterday. Changed that sentence accordingly.

It's installed by default in some linux repos. Getting that changed would go a long way.

Thanks for the information I will check it out

yes, I try to find some opensource software to treat my png file. Google lead me to GIMP, it is not bad so I keep using.

Krita was initially release as a painting program rather than a photo editing program and that was where most of the initial 'advertising' was focused. Also looking at their home page the first thing you see is a screen shot of a digital painting and the words

"Krita is the full-featured digital art studio.

It is perfect for sketching and painting, and presents an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters."

So it is not at all clear to most people that it is a tool that can also be used for photo editing.

We have eight sponsored developers and about six million users. I don't think we're gonna asphyxiate any time soon :-)

Indeed I always though Krita was an Inkscape alternative, guess I need to try it again (tried it more than 10 years ago or so).

> I don't know if it's just americans not wanting to touch a European project or what, but it's just infuriating

That's some weird complex. I doubt most people know what piece of free software is European versus American. I further doubt it has any meaningful impact on adoption.

I agree it's bizzare, but why else would it be that all the US Linux distros use Gnome and all the European ones use KDE?

Do they? Ubuntu, Mint are both European are using Gnome or at least GTK.

Red Hat/Fedora uses Gnome because Gnome is basically a Red Hat product. This has nothing to do with the geography of the distro.

Unfortunately, a lot more people use Gnome. Which is a shame in my opinion. But it is the way it is.

How is Ubuntu European?

Mint I'll grant, though I always thought of it as a thin fork of Ubuntu. Interestingly the first version was based on Kubuntu - I wonder what motivated them to change, but the old release notes appear to have disappeared.

Canonical is a UK company.

It is undeniable that corporate Linux has prefered GNOME over Plasma, I can't name you a single relevant European distro that uses Plasma as its default.

- Canonical (United Kingdom) ships GNOME for Ubuntu.

- SUSE (Germany) ships GNOME as default on their SUSE Enterprise Linux, openSUSE hsa no defaults.

- Manjaro (Austria, France, Germany according to DistroWatch) ships XFCE (GTK based) by default.

- Mint (Ireland) ships 3 GTK desktops, defaulting to Cinnamon.

Meanwhile, on America:

- Valve (USA) ships Plasma on SteamOS for their desktop experience.

- System76 (USA) ships (although they hate it) GNOME for PopOS. They want to replace it with a Rust-based, GTK/Qt-free alternative.

- Red Hat (USA) ships GNOME as their official desktop for RHEL.

- Fedora (USA) ships GNOME as their official desktop.

So I don't think country impacts much, it is just that GTK is the de facto toolkit for Linux and historically, Qt wasn't FOSS and GNOME received a lot of development for accessibility during Sun's days, which matters a lot for corporate due to stricter requirements on that front.

Social graph? Americans tend to know other Americans, Europeans other Europeans, on account of geographic and political proximity. Possibly the divide is a symptom of the underlying communication network.

I think it was more about companies than individuals. European companies (e.g. SUSE, Mandrake) defaulted to KDE, whilst US companies (e.g. Red Hat, Novell) to GNOME.

I don't know why. Maybe it was RMS who pushed for GNOME as back then Qt wasn't free software (as in FSF or OSI approved license). Maybe it was that KDE started in Europe and later GNOME in the US to provide an alternative to the “non-free” KDE.

This caused European funding (from companies and institutions) to go to KDE, and US funding to go to GNOME, thus creating the communities and ecosystems we have today.

Another point for GNOME back in the day for companies, was that it was (could be?) more locked than KDE and it had less customization options. These are desirable traits if you want to install it to your company's workstations, so maybe it made sense for Red Hat to adopt GNOME.

The key point in time where GNOME became way more popular, was when Ubuntu came out with GNOME as the default desktop. A smaller point was when Novell bought SUSE, so SUSE switched to GNOME, leaving almost no commercial distros that default to KDE.

All in all, it doesn't matter much anymore. Our life and workloads have moved to the cloud and locked down devices, thus limiting the surface area of desktop environments and their ecosystem.

Thanks for recommending it! I installed it and seems promising, will test it next time I will need to edit raster image.

And I encountered this before and left the website on opening it.

> I don't know if it's just americans not wanting to touch a European project or what, but it's just infuriating.

It has "Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program" with FREE straight out of scam ad.

"painting" is of no relevance to me, I edit photos. None of examples has photos - all are drawing editing (I opened https://krita-artists.org/t/maybe-mention-photo-editing-at-t... according to their bug reporting guidelines)

Prominent self-ad/sponsor banners/5 star testimonials adding to scam feeling.

It seems less prominent now but I remember that it previously had some vaguely NSFWish animeish art on website. And startup screen has some disfigured cross of human and bunny(?) what for me is worse than "Gimp" as name.

It's not sucking all the oxygen from Krita. Those who want to hack on gimp and those who want to hack on Krita will either hack on both, or largely don't exist.

If you are infuriated by a project that has been around longer than Krita, then I think you need to seriously reconsider what makes you mad.

I think GIMP is still pretty important because it at least gave you options over buying or pirating Photoshop. Nowadays, I use Affinity Photo over any of them, but the importance of choice matters, because piracy doesn't impact Adobe's reach. It further entrenches it as the norm.

Today, with Krita, Affinity, Pixelmator and the like, I would never suggest its "morally right" to pirate Photoshop, because you will still inadvertently support an Adobe monoculture. The morally right choice is to use anything else, and the competitors are functionally capable of supporting 95% of Photoshop's features.

Also, GIMP did give us GTK, which solved a very real issue with open source desktops -- none of them were actually open source at the time. Gnome still conducts the very important work of supporting GTK.

GIMP has always claimed to be a replacement for Photoshop, and has always failed to live up to that claim when I've tried it.

After being lied to, I'm not eager to try again and see if I'll be lied to again. I'll just use Photoshop because it has always worked where GIMP never has.

If GIMP has truly, finally achieved their stated claims of replacing Photoshop (presumably through feature parity), then I'm glad to hear it for all those still willing to try it, but I've no interest in wasting any more of my time verifying that claim than I already have in the past.

Except that GIMP never has claimed that. Sure, some users of GIMP have made that claim, and many reviews in magazines (back when those still existed) and on website have made that claim, but the GIMP people have always made clear that they are making their own thing, not an X-replacement.

I love GIMP. I don't care for photoshop.

Yes.

Gimp is forever a major part of free software history and deserves total respect for that.

Everyone is free to use it today, or just get some of the better implemented alternatives... that's the beauty of open source.

> GIMP has failed to live up to a lot of its promises,

Which failed promises are you referring to specifically?

Eventual CMYK support was announced back when I had hair. Today I'm pretty sure that CMYK still isn't supported, though I think there might have been some recent advances in that area. Non-destructive editing was supposed to also become a thing with GEGL, but that never really materialized.

This has been discussed in a recent thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31419928

I needed this the other day. CMYK output is in the 2.99.xx nightly builds and works fine. Export only, can’t work in cmyk natively.

So it took 27 years to add CMYK support? Well there is progress I guess.

It's in nightly, so it might be in prod 5 years from now :-)

I have a 2 year old desktop apple computer and GIMP gets about 2 fps for simple tasks like using the pencil to draw. (maybe it's better on linux or PC)

It's, sadly, a LOT faster on a Windows machine. Performance (especially boot times) is horrid on even more powerful Macs (M1Pro f.ex).

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